This movie sucked
Not scary and made no sense.
shareMade no sense to you...
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MovieChat Forums > The Abandoned (2007) Discussion > This movie sucked
this movie is crap!
shareTotally disagree. It's not just another entertain-me-while-I-crunch-popcorn movie.
It had a rather interesting and unusual directing and storytelling technique.
This movie can be correlated with The Shining. The The Ring and The Grudge are also in the same style. But his is a thriller and it's a tragedy.
There is NO "happy end"* here...
* Hollywood's "trademark", they even made The Little Mermaid into a cartoon with a "happy end".
right on, raider
shareIt was fair. It would've made a very good 50-minute short. Beyond that point, it became repetitious and tiresome, going round in circles, and the mystery is never quite explained. Why is this house alive with ghosts?, what's with the doppelganger thing?. It feels more like someone's nasty nightmare than a straightforward story/situation. Very good photography and atmosphere though, but that's about it.
sharethis movie was too long, it had tons of cliches in it, and wasn't scary at all. From the technical point of view it was well done (camerawork, effects and stuff), but the flick took itself too serious. I was laughing when the center of Sofia was shown, even this "Bulgaria" statue (or whatever its name is) and Marie Jones tells her daughter on the phone that "Russia is beautiful". WTF? Apparently everything what isn't USA is Russia.
What was this doppelganger stuff? What about the car, and Anatoliy? Why did father want to kill his baby-kids if he loved them so much?
I mean i love the movies which don't don't explain you every detail of the story and leave you questioning "what the hell was that about?" (like Cube, Cypher, Dead Birds, Re-Cycle, The last winter, Memento, Pan's Labyrinth, Ichi the killer, Deathwatch, Videodrome, Solyaris, Stay, The I inside, No country for old men, Lost HIghway, Naked Lunch, Mulholland Dr. and so on).
But this one seems to be done this complex just to hide how poor the story and how low the "scaryness" of the movie is. It seems like the makers of the flick took some random scary effects together and afterwards tried to made a decent story out of it.
If you want to see some decent movie of the sort, watch "Dagon" - it has pretty the same premise, but scared the *beep* outta me and was kinda funny from time to time.
So i gave this movie a 5 out of ten, because it was only the technical part which was done good, but the soul of the movie is not there.
*SPOILERS*
I think that the movie explained itself pretty well. The whole idea of the movie is the fact that you cannot escape what is supposed to happen. It's sort of the existential idea of the past coming at you from the future (the idea of contingency) taken to an extreme. They were supposed to die, so they were brought back, on their birthdays no less, in order to fulfill the destiny (I use this term somewhat loosely) that was set out for them in their childhood. Now, what more needs explaining? The doppelganger thing is simply what it says, they show what they are supposed to be and what will happen. As for Antilony (or whoever the driver was), that is something that is left up for you to decide (perhaps another piece in the puzzle to reunite them with their past), as are the motives for the father killing them.
As for the movie being crap, that is just nonsense. It is an extremely well-made, well-acted, and well-written movie. Whether or not you liked it is a different story. And as for the comparison with Dagon, there really is no comparison, because it does bear a little resemblance, although this is a far better movie (Stuart Gordon what happened?!), but this was much closer to what the House on Haunted Hill remake was trying to do, only it made it work.
I think the movie was ok, was a good story but certainly not great, I don't think I would watch it again.
shareI just watched this, and had to back it up a few times to catch some of the ideas. I thought it was a pretty good movie overall (and the ghosts/doppelgangers were darn freaky), but I have one big issue with the premise.
And that issue is the idea of destiny and fate. Why was the destiny of the kids to die? Why wasn't their destiny to live? I may have missed something in there, but it seems contrived to just push through the plot to have mysterious and spooky things happen. Especially at the end when she runs from the lawyer's office and runs into herself- which has already happened to her so maybe she would like to stop and say "Hi! Don't go in their or you die."?
I've not explained this well above- nice movie, spooky, but I just don't like/get the overall premise of how some nut job murderer gets to kill his kids instead of the mom/maid getting to save them because "fate" said so. Maybe I'm just dense?
Yup. I get it, but this movie just depends too much on suspension of disbelief from the viewer. It's too vague in an frustrating way, not captivating.
Reincarnation (Rinne) had a similar theme, but it was much better executed than this.
dancingcancer41,
I have to agree with the majority of the people on this thread. This film was disappointing. I liked the dopplegangers and I thought some of the scares were decent, but I have to disagree your the belief that the movie explained itself well. This type of film (like the Sixth Sense) that has some sort of mystery/twist ending requires the viewer to understand how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Sure, there's always room for mystery and for some things to be left unexplained/up to the viewer's imagination (the ending to Blair Witch for example) but this film is not the case.
You say that the film argues that one cannot escape their fate, but the twins's father mentions his granddaughter and wanting her there. If the film is to work as you say, the granddaughter would've come looking for her mom and been caught in the 'trap' as well, thereby tying the film together. Also, if Marie was supposed to die as a baby then her daughter was never supposed to have been born. And yet, she lives. And says in the closing v.o. that she'll never go looking for her mom. It's all a bit thin unfortunately.
I get that the filmmakers wanted a cool, twist ending... but there are ways to set one up so that the film hangs together at least somewhat plausibly.
Oh, and I think the reason one person mentioned this film being similar to 'Dagon' (which is a film I love) is that both films share the premises of a child being 'called' back to their home for nefarious reasons.
J.
I suppose it's the difference between tastes. To me, there was enough information for me to interpret the rest on my own (unfortunately I can't argue the ending plot points because I haven't seen the movie in a number of months now and can't remember specifics), while others like a crisp, clean ending. If I watch it again sometime soon, I'll try to re-assert my interpretation so maybe we can both see where the difference lies.
share[deleted]
good explaination, great movie taste you've got.
But still i'd give 6.5 out of 10.
i think everyone must have a profile which can be seen in imdb, where you can see a persons favorite films.
Apparently everything what isn't USA is Russia.
What the hell are you talking about? This is not an American movie.
I don't love her.. She kicked me in the face!! share
I didn't like it much either. I think that it had the potential to be one of those awesome movies that leave you thinking about it for days, but it just lost it. She gets to the house and that is where you think things will really pick up and get interesting... and they do, but then they get boring and start to repeat themselves. She ends up back in that office and then she is at the house again. It's like wtf? And her brother is alive, then he's gone, and he's alive again... and it doesn't get explained very well.
Plus the fact that Marie had a daughter kind of ruined the whole circle thing. If the whole circle thing and returning to the house to be a "family" was supposed to be a strong point to the movie then the daughter would have gone to the house in search of her mother and got caught up in it as well... sort of tying the whole story together.
I was sad that this movie wasn't as good as it could have been for me... but I must admit that the doubles were freaky and the lighting for the movie was excellent. It gave off the proper creepy vibes.
I agree. It had potential but sadly it wasn't made the most of. Just too long and too boring.
shareYou are totally right, not scary and made no sense.
shareI thought this movie was excellent. I don't if it's because I have a movie theater in my house or not. When I watch movies I watch them in full volume.
I agree the story wasn't that great but I think the soundtrack was awesome as well as the visuals.
Once thing I hate most about movies is when something is going to happen so the music gives you a clue that something will by building. In this film the audio doesn't build which I love, I think that's what made me jump a lot was the unexpected scares since the music wasn't giving clues to when they would happen.
If you plan to watch this movie, do it at full volume using a good audio system. It makes the movie so much better.
I agree - it sucked. I haven't been this disappointed since Silent Hill. Very little made sense... For example, what about when Nikolai fell in the hole in the floor, then the hole was gone, then he came back? No explanation. And why did they keep showing the flooded basement area? That seemed unrelated.
OK, so there was a "Final Destination" theme of "your fate is inevitable", but it was nebulously presented. And the set was melodramatically "atmospheric". Every time they showed the interior of the old house, I felt like the set designers were thinking "how can we make it look old and super-creepy?" Lame.
You seem like one of those moviegoers who needs a plausible explanation for every moment within a film -- even one that is fantasy-driven in its plotline. Here's a theory -- an, yeah, its only a theory -- as to why things (i.e. hole in floor incident; Nikolai's return) weren't sequentially, logically constant or consistent: the house itself might represent a gateway from the land of the living to the land of the dead (harkening to Fulci's films). It needs no logic, no scientific phenomena, no explanation otherwise. The house is a supernatural force in its time-shifting inconsistencies -- there is no constant state there. It feeds off death; it lives off the past that was meant to be enacted there.
(The house, I think, is a terrific character, btw -- freaky deaky)